Anticipation or expectation of a sensory event that must be paired with an action is essentially a form of attention that is crucial for an organism's interaction with the external world. The accurate pairing of sensation and action, assuming these functions are intact, is dependent on timing and is called sensory-motor timing, one aspect of which is anticipatory timing. Anticipatory timing is essential to successful everyday living, not only for actions but also for thinking. Thinking or cognition can be viewed as an abstract motor function and therefore also needs accurate sensory-cognitive timing. Sensory-motor timing is the timing related to the sensory and motor coordination of an organism when interacting with the external world. Anticipatory timing is usually a component of sensory-motor timing and is literally the ability to predict sensory information before the initiating stimulus.
Anticipatory timing is essential for reducing reaction times and improving both movement and thought performance. Anticipatory timing only applies to predictable sensory-motor or sensory-thought timed coupling. The sensory modality (i.e., visual, auditory etc.), the location, and the time interval between stimuli, must all be predictable (i.e., constant, or consistent with a predictable pattern) to enable anticipatory movement or thought.
Without reasonably accurate anticipatory timing, a person cannot catch a ball, know when to step out of the way of a moving object (e.g., negotiate a swinging door), get on an escalator, comprehend speech, concentrate on mental tasks or handle any of a large number of everyday tasks and challenges. This capacity for anticipatory timing can become impaired with aging, alcohol, drugs, hypoxia, infection, clinical neurological conditions including but not limited to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, autism and brain trauma (head injury or concussion). For example, brain trauma may significantly impact a person's cognition timing, one aspect of which is anticipatory timing. Sometimes, a person may appear to physically recover quickly from head or brain trauma, but have significant problems with concentration, memory, headaches, irritability and other symptoms as a result of impaired anticipatory timing. In addition, impaired anticipatory timing may cause the person to suffer further injuries by not having the timing capabilities to avoid accidents.